Dartmouth High students work with DNA in mobile lab

Friday

Mar 23, 2012 at 12:01 AMMar 26, 2012 at 1:47 PM

There are few sights more typical than a school bus. But instead of containing seats and left-behind lunches, the bus at Dartmouth High School this week is filled with beakers, flat-screen TVs and tubes.

ANIKA CLARK

DARTMOUTH — There are few sights more typical than a bus at a school. But instead of containing seats and left-behind lunches, the bus at Dartmouth High School this week is filled with beakers, flat-screen TVs and tubes ominously labeled "Crime DNA" and "Suspect 2."

Meet the Boston University School of Medicine "MobileLab." The roaming, 40-foot laboratory helps make science relevant to children who have probably never heard the name "Mr. Wizard" and who live in an age of infinitely more advanced technology.

"Especially (for) kids in high school and middle school, the hands-on manipulation of DNA or protein, or just using some of the tools, it brings it to life in a way that ... reading a textbook just can't do," said Mark Jurman, science educator at the traveling MobileLab and the CityLab that's rooted at the BU School of Medicine.

Starting with "The Case of the Crown Jewels" — a lesson using DNA collected from a mock crime scene — Jurman roped in Renee Vieira's Biology 1 class by referencing everything from the hit show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" to the O.J. Simpson trial.

To illustrate how DNA could be linked from a "suspect" with DNA from the "crime scene," he directed Jordan Antongiorgi to pose as an enzyme (a protein that triggers a chemical reaction). Jurman then dubbed that enzyme "Jordanase."

He then explained how this enzyme — known as a "restriction enzyme" — yields pieces of equal length when it cuts matching DNA.

"I think it's cool that we're actually working with real DNA," said Kyla Costa, after working with her lab partner, Melanie Fucillo.

The lesson was part of a multi-day visit by the MobileLab, for which Peter Bangs, lead teacher for the science department, credited chemistry teacher Elizabeth Russell.

The MobileLab "drives home the realism of science for a lot of kids," said Bangs. And those who assume they're "not good" at the subject can discover "they're quite capable of doing this very high-level laboratory stuff."

Next up, Thursday morning, was Sandra Mitra's honors biology class. Using a saltwater solution, the freshmen swished and spit their cells into a cup before pouring the mixtures into beakers.

"It's not gross. It's just cells," Jurman said good-naturedly after a process that isolated the cells into a murky group, eliciting groans and leading one student to insist she could see bits of the snack she'd eaten before class.

The students were preparing to mass-copy a section of their DNA through a technique called polymerase chain reaction, to examine whether they posses what's called an "Alu insert" on a particular spot of a specific chromosome. This process offers insight into their ancestry.

"This particular (Alu insert), the one that's located on chromosome 16 in this particular location, that one ended up there in an individual ... approximately 14,000 years ago," explained Bangs, who said this person lived somewhere in Asia. "All of that person's descendants will carry that."

By late Thursday morning, Bangs said partial examination of samples another class had collected earlier revealed that one student had this specific Alu insert on both chromosome 16's — and thus has parents who share that ancient ancestor. Another student had the Alu insert on neither chromosome.

Bangs stressed the real-world relevance of the work.

"You're not just doing it to see 'Does the substance turn blue when you're done?'" he said.

Meanwhile, Jurman described the positive impact it can have on children's view of science.

In the span of a few hours, "you're not going to make a scientist out of somebody right away but ... you can get them interested in science and math," he said. "These are the subjects that a lot of kids just turn off to early on, and then once they do that, how do you get them back?"